he initial sequence in the film Citizen Kane, a
masterpiece by Orson Welles, shows the moment
in which the tycoon character dies, while from his
lifeless hand a crystal ball falls and shatters into a
hundred pieces as it hit the floor. Also known as snow globes
and invented in the 19th century, these artifacts are symbols
of the modern ideal of world domination, replicating a scaled
down model of urban and rural landscapes or monuments.
These mass produced tourist souvenirs miniaturize reality and
eternalize the image of a place in a continuum loop where
it never ceases snowing. Nonetheless, these are articles of
consumption, anthropologically and culturally marked by the
experience and history of those who acquire them as a gesture
of memorabilia.
At first glance, some of Alan Manuel Gonzalez’s
hyperrealists canvases seem to have been constructed to trap
the neocolonial omnivorous and predatory fascination of the
occasional tourist who travels in search of stereotypical and
preconceived images of Cuba: the city in ruins, the spontaneity
and revelry of the Havana people, and the antique cars from
1950’s that seem to have risen from the ashes, which is perhaps
the best example of the persistent resiliency of Cubans.
However, this strategy of visual seduction, is nothing more
than a false veil for the unwary eye that is not striving to
rigorously observe the painting; a trompe l’oeil that pursues as
in the fable of the “trapped hunter”, those who like tourists
in search of a cheap souvenir, long for the easy and superficial
photo to post on their social networks, without establishing a
minimum commitment towards the desperate reality they left
behind when flying back to their homes.

Alan Manuel’s paintings does not deny those clichés that
are in part truth. He moves in a complicated balance between
the everyday social landscape and a critical discourse where
time becomes a metaphor of an existence that pushes through
pressing precariousness and difficulties. His paintings are
capsules of that extreme and controversial reality, fragments
of life confined in transparent containers that allow us to
watch but not to get too close. The fragility of glass becomes a
symbol of weakness in that ecosystem subjected to the pressure
of history, to a long wait in which time has stopped, as if the
fine funnel of an hourglass had been obstructed. The island is
then the image adrift of a shipwreck, a geography, a country, a
nation of people trapped in a bottle. “The damn circumstance of
water everywhere” that Virgilio Piñera wrote in his memorable
La Isla en Peso. Like it happens with this poem, we can almost
hear an anguished and desperate scream coming from Alan
Manuel’s pieces: “No one can escape, no one can escape!”.
The encapsulated characters sometimes press themselves
against the glass to call viewer’s attention, maybe looking
for help to escape from their captivity (“Marveled or SelfPortrait at 45th”. 2017). They cannot be heard, though,
3

for their sounds are not able to break through the hermetic
wall of that “Deaf Bubble”, like its author has named it. Many
times those figures are recurrent self-portraits in continuous
attempts to flee, whether by climbing a slender royal palm
tree vertically growing until it opens the cap of an empty milk
bottle (“The Escape” II, 2018), or by pushing the cork out of a
“Test Tube” (2017) to liberate itself from the risky experiment
that the Cuban Revolution project has been.
But then, in the artist’s most recent canvases the containers
restricting the form that lived inside have disappeared. The
liquid metaphor present throughout Alan Manuel’s entire
work has broken the barriers that once defined the thousands
of glass objects in which life on the street remained trapped.
His current project remodel the tension of those fragile
structures as the new visual allegories are kept inside ready to

burst liquid bubbles. I don’t know if Alan Manuel Gonzalez
have read anything by sociologist writer Zygmunt Bauman,
but, without doubt, his capacity to observe the social context
of the present Cuba and create these imaginary fluids, cannot
be more accurate to describe or allow us to perceives the latent
transition that is about to take place.
It is often said that reality surpasses fiction. Being
confronted with these bizarre scenes where island’s
inhabitants carry on with their daily struggles while the
water is literally up to their knees, remind us of the dramatic
photographs of a country hit by hurricanes and flooding.

This wicked combination between time and space and –yet
again– the damn circumstance, makes the situations in the
island worse by further draining the life out of its people
already enduring economic and political crisis for more
than half a century. In this sense, it is highly symbolical that
bubble in which a shark –it could very well be the symbol of
capitalism– uproots the concept of nation embodied by the
royal palm tree; or the one in which a hummingbird catches a
hundred dollar bill with its beak.
On the tag of every antique car painted in Alan Manuel’s
canvases, we can read “1959-2018”. The Cuban people have
climbed aboard this outdated vessels to slowly get across
the stage of national history, crammed into a concept of the
collective that is “sinking the boat” in the current historicalsocial juncture. Knowingly that the bubble in which they
have been submerged for so many years is diluting and
losing its form bit by bit. Perhaps the message suggested in
these paintings with the greatest possible realism –or with
uncertainty–, is that the responsibility ultimately falls on its
people, inhabitants of a miniature island, an imperfect model
that floats inside a crystal ball in the Caribbean Sea, for it is
up to them to make the bubble burst. It is also their decision
of whether to fall into the abyss of geopolitical hostility or to
move with fluidity towards change, without forgetting the
good values still engraved in our humanity. In any case, the
work of Alan Manuel Gonzalez is an account of that tense
wait, of the fragile border that separates the island, as an
idealized place in the political imagery of the 20th century,
from the surrounding global landscape. Its bubbles and crystal
architectures are chronotopes in which the epic national daily
life is written in lower case.

n Peter Greenaway’s The Bedside Book (1996), when Jerome
suggests Nagiko to rewrite the book on his body assuming
it as territory or map, he is using it as medium to express
love, revenge, the passing of time, and death.
Painting as writing, as reflexive exercise, also involves
the body, a body broached from its own self-referential
representation.
The obsession for the body has led western culture to
the search of beauty as pathological condition, while the
own creation of a corporal identity has been the basis of all
ontology. The body as reference and archetype. The body as
canvas, as map to write on, the body from which time becomes
“visible”; it all shows signs of a concern that devours human
existence.
Painting, like any form of contemporary art, is preceded
by unwonted reminiscences, remembrances and evocations
that unexpectedly startle us. Contemporary art has gained
the loss of a canonic didacticism, and Andy Llanes Bultó (San
Antonio de los Baños, 1987) plays with these paradoxes to free
his somber characters from the resentment caused by their
loneliness.
Andy Llanes’ figures are men without faces or faces
without bodies, blurred, as if their heads had been changed, as
belonging to another dimension where they shiver and contort
themselves. They are androgynous bodies that search one
another in unity and difference, bodies from which a fiction
emerges as limited space devoured by time.
Andy Llanes achieves a visual synthesis that includes all the
bodies in its unity. The transvestite body transgressed by a wish;
the transparency of the body in its decomposition and death.

The body as laceration, as deep wound that recalls a dream
or a nightmare. The fragmented body. “The body […] is the
sudden reminiscence. The body is the permanence of infinite surge,
the form of a memory, i.e., an image.” 1 The resurrection of the
bodies as hyperthermia of immortality.
Andy Llanes Bultó has created an evocative and beautiful
body of work of complex simplicity. At first sight they are
bodies enduring a burden, a feeling they try to expurgate
through the earnest contortion of their gestures. The chromatic
reduction underlines that feeling. More than a chromatic
reduction, Andy Llanes intends to achieve a deepening,

an exploration with the sole purpose of stressing the pathos of
the ineffable. With strong influences from Impressionism and
photo-realism, Andy Llanes abounds in techniques that end in
an exercise of profound seduction and eroticism. A seduction
full of hidden aspects, of small, very fragile frightening winks.
His choice of a compulsory circularity for his “framings”
is noteworthy. The circular form in most of his canvases recalls
the profound state of perfection of the spheres in the orphic
world, an experience of the senses that destroys time and leads
to moral purity. The infinite circularity introduces a dynamics
that is closer to the germinative search than to the perpetual
cutting of the lines as conclusive causality.
Andy Llanes Bultó recalls in his painting the search of
the own self, the search of the other (the androgynous) that
is present in oneself. They are forceful strokes, as of one
opening the way in gravitating darkness, with an emphasis
in chiaroscuros and with sepias as confluent polarities. In the
end, no one can account for the fears conceived by the human
being; Andy Llanes, however, approaches a search that is full
of volatile fragments.
Ritual (2017-2018) is an exquisite series, a refined gift
for our senses. But Ritual is also a convincing example of the
turn in Cuban painting in the last twenty years. Ritual is the
emphatic demonstration that it can be made using a support
with more than two thousand years of tradition. Ritual is a
series that covers the inexhaustible human mystery in its
interceptions and forks. Andy Llanes Bultó is an essential link
in that group of new Cuban painters that have achieved fair
recognition in their contemporariness thanks to an image
that equals the best of international contemporary art. Like a
dedicated craftsman, he prepares his brushes to anticipate the
cosmos of creation in an act of unknown purpose.
1

espite being one of our most authentic young
artists, the critics in our days have overlooked
the work of Rafael Villares (Havana, 1989) with
certain passiveness and mistrust. Perhaps that
same authenticity creates a conflict among us, reporters of
the emerging Cuban art, who many times choose the easy
critical interpretation and leave aside, in a silent zone, those
productions that distance themselves from the norm and are
marked by a different complexity.the transparency of the body
in its decomposition and death.
However, it seems impossible to silence the weight of a
profound work in its conceptual scope, created on the basis
of a careful research and articulated with unwonted visual
aesthetics that cannot be condensed in a segment or definitive
language. And the reason is that when Rafael Villares pretends
to modify our perception of space and specifically the
landscape as rational image, he ends by creating a crisis for any
determinism.
It is no secret that Villares reached maturity quite early.
Certain works from his first youth like Finisterre (2005) are
memorable; in it he dares handle one of our most common
traumas, the insularity, without treating is as commonplace. In
this piece he artist appeals to photography as support, and he will
return to it at other moments of his production. From his days
in San Alejandro we also recall his disconcerting installations
and environments, in which he definitely establishes his future
obsessions and most frequent ideas: the approach of the
landscape as sensorial experience, the perception of space and
its relation to the subject, and the leading role of the natural
and organic as source of a transcendent existence.

The intervention Aliento (Breath) (2008) was perhaps the
climax of his initiation in installation art. The purpose was
to reproduce a field of caña brava, with all the unsuspected
sensations they produce inside an exhibition space. In
addition, the artist availed himself of another resource to boost
the experience: sound, not only complementing the physical
space but contributing to a more detailed perception of it. It
should be mentioned that the union of appearance and sound
reappeared increasingly in Villares’s work, reflecting the way
in which we receive and create stimuli. With that same logic
he also articulated the visual essays that make up the series
De soledad humana (Of Human Loneliness) (2009), with the
particularly surprising installations Éxodo de un diente de león
(Exodus of a Lion’s Tooth) and De soledad humana (Of Human
Loneliness), based on different concepts though equally
reflexive in their discourse.

Already at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), Villares
continued to display his theses on the landscape through his
work. But now he will tend to do away with the enclosure that
distinguished his first installation period. In this way the level
of affectation and change in the spectator (pretended since his
initial creations) will grow, since his now much larger pieces
will establish a dialogue with the landscape and the strangest
viewers.
For the Eleventh Havana Biennial (2012) the artist
prepared two projects of remarkable impact because of their
physical dimensions and because they predicted a turn in his
visual art form. Reconciliación (Reconciliation) (2012), a piece
installed in the ISA campus, consisted of two urban street
lamps that called the attention because of their appearance:
their upper parts were twisted at the height of the lamps,
ending in a single support that rose from the ground.
21

The suggestive detail was that one of them had been used in
the USA, while the other belonged to our context.
Paisaje itinerante (Itinerant Landscape) (2012) was another
of the artist’s visual essays. A kind of giant flowerpot contained
a tree and a bench. On the lower part there was an access for
the spectators. Villares had previously developed this concept
of inhabitable work, but never like that. The flowerpot,
which was exhibited in La Cabaña and two other important
spots of the Havana malecón became a metaphor related to
contemplation. Even though the public could enter that
unusual piece, everyone preferred to observe it from outside,
become fascinated with its poetic ingeniousness, and take a
snapshot without damaging its formal beauty. In terms of
intervention and dialogue with the urban landscape, Paisaje is
a landmark among Villares’s formulations.
In recent years the artist has brought his production again
to the gallery. As a matter of fact he continues to explore the
same topics, i.e., the landscape and its perceptive variations,
but now from a vision that adds the transcendent, the multiple
coincidences that appear when searching into nature as center
of life. Perhaps it is in this point that Rafael Villares most
clearly and profoundly articulates his pantheism.
One of his most recent series, Morfología del eco (Morphology
of the Echo) (2014 to the present), tells about a research
process compiling scientific (apocryphal?) data, philosophical
speculations and visual representations of an essential truth:
the existence of a single spirit, of a single (divine?) force that
mutates, trying to become visible in the most dissimilar earthly
features. Thus, through different supports we are told about
the transcendent relation that may develop between a tree
and a human being, rivers and lightning, the Earth and the
elements that inhabit it.
In a certain way, Rafael Villares confirms with this series
his aesthetic standpoint, marked by compositional freedom
and the handling of mixed solutions. He would seem to be
addressing us all the time with a certain chronic romanticism
from a different philosophy of art, letting us feel that
imagination and poetry as resource to deal with reality and the
human condition have not disappeared.

othing is more representative in a “visual” artist
than his own visual image. The ability to “represent himself ”, mold and mutate is also the
impossibility of his own representation, which is
simultaneously his faking.
In current art (which is not what is known as contemporary
art, but all the art produced “today”) there is an odd-looking
creature, a biped animal that could be called Homo Visual
Sapiens. This walking, mutating and almost liquid being is
what re-presents the trend known as contemporary art.
No stage of development in art has ever been led by a nonexistent movement as avant garde. But neither had art been
assassinated previously as did Arthur Danto, although the
criminal evidence still has to determine whether the action was
a murder or the sad suicide of the trans vanguard or conceptual
art. What indeed is evident is that the homo visual sapiens
is the survivor of the holocaust of the word art, and that
museums are the graveyards where the remains of the victims
are conserved. In the near future the living beings will have
to find the corpses or fossils of the art from our days that was
never regarded as contemporary art by the Homo Visual Sapiens
legitimatizers.
I have been “creating” for about 40 years within the
society of entertainment, which is the present society,
wisely defined by Guy Debord. I have been experimenting
unexplored languages and have used all my abilities (as
eclectic as my own life) to enjoy the daily pleasure of
transmitting my inner world in images, sounds, and ideas.

I am happy to be fully non-dependent of the commercialization
of the product of my inner life, and for this reason I consider
myself a free man. I was also lucky to be able to set the bases
of my own freedom, including the freedom of totally lacking
a style. I am not tied to anything in my creative work because,
as Nazoa, I believe in love and art as channels toward the
enjoyment of a lasting life. In my work I mercilessly employ
all the instruments within my reach, which I also study and
try to master.
My recent work consists of four well-defined series
with some subseries in between. I use photography, digital
programs, traditional (and not so traditional) materials, the
usual supports and other virtual ones. I mix all this at the
moment of creating or use it in layers, as steps until reaching
the final outcome. My process normally starts with an idea,
although sometimes I make experiments with automatism,
creating on the black or white space offered by digital support.
What moves my ideas is an emotional or mental state resulting
from the vital experience or from my own intellectual learning
process. I use music as therapy and also as another means of
liberating my neurons by composing with digital programs.
If the course of life, in addition to survival, consists of
leaving behind one’s glance beyond the loving dust that we are,

then my work along this path has consisted in approaching my
environment with a peripheral glance, thus obtaining a visceral
observation of the near encounters with my vital, cosmological
reality deprived of all extra-artistic interest. I am not worried
about my re-presentation, but about my center-to-center
relation with the environment. I do not establish convenient
relations for what they may give me in return. The art of the
opportunities of becoming a renowned artist conveys a dose
of social hypocrisy that is incompatible with my form of life,
and therefore I feel distant from the concept of Homo Visual
Sapiens and prefer to be called simply Homo Sapiens with some
conceptual-creative abilities.

ith what phases, components and processes of
contemporary life is painting linked? The city,
advertising, the merchandise and the swiftness
of social and personal movement, among
others, are elements that attract attention making it impossible
to escape the temptations produced by their images.
Postmodern procedures are employed to achieve this:
pastiche, parody, deconstruction and intertextuality penetrate
not only the morphology of the work in relation with
advertising fetishes, mixtures of their images and values, screen
captions and constant elements of fashion and comics, but also
the meanings of reception context that make them possible.
Philosopher Jacques Rancière has the following argument
on it: “The destruction of the mimetic order does not mean that
the arts have been doing “anything” since the 19th century, or
that they dedicate themselves freely to the conquest of their own
medium. A medium is not “one’s own” means or material. It is a
surface for the change. . .” 1
The work of the young artist William Acosta borders the
dangerous contemporary world of the image, and what at first
sight may seem an ingenious game of advertising, images and
urban subjects, beautiful forms and attractive glimpses of what
is public, are in fact a theme of reflection on the life of our
times.
The ability and dexterity with which the creator handles
them according to their dissimilar origins make up his
discourse, since it is not just a visual game or a harmonious
composition, but the means through which that surface

behaves as an image, containing, as pointed out by Rancière,
articulations between “the forms of doing and some forms of
visibility and intelligibility that determine the way in which they
may be seen and thought…” 2
This search on the conversions brings to light the
representations of superimposed, intertwined and mixed
meanings, achieving a movement that approaches the painting
event to its most constant opponents: photography and the
cinematography.
His most recent series Autómata y Mentiras brillantes
(Automat and Bright Lies) approach Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner or the Sense 8 series by the Wachovsky sisters. But the
approaches are different in each case; the film images emerge
from the whole composition, those of the series are more
related to the presence and spirit of the characters, in which
the individuality of each one of them is only possible through
the existence of the group.
The characters William shows us are part of the urban
atmosphere, as if they could not escape it and merge with the
environment, somehow showing the uprooting that exists in
all of them when you are only classified by the environment. In
those cases when they appear facing backwards, the harmony of
advertising has been violated, since this pose is neither obliging
nor expresses satisfaction. On the contrary, the intention is to
highlight their quality of bearers of the problems caused by the
voracious life of the metropolis; they have thus become cultural
codes that facilitate the meanings related with advertising and
the market. As he states: “... we are conditioned by advertising ...
it creates disorder in your conscience and enslaves you.” 3
He sets the urban landscapes in different contexts, granting
them a different image, another appearance, and thus creates a
new city making use of the entire visual arsenal at our disposal.
As in the last-mentioned series, he turns us into replicas of the
forms of life, with the capacity to reproduce a common destiny
through gestures, positions and forms of dressing up.
Formal mastery, harmony and balance appear in most
works, but what distinguishes them is not only related to
adequate formal solutions; it is the transformation into
images of the simulated values that sustain the contemporary
individual, which becomes evident in the indifference of a
disoriented passer-by when the city is registered on his body
and he has become a public object asking himself: What am
I in midst of this confusion of lights, colors and noises in
constant movement?

The cities have been displayed in many layers, but only in
the painting do we see them in the same space, crowded with
buildings, public spaces, traversed by cars and men as if both
were the same thing.

he paintings of Adrián Socorro (Matanzas, 1979)
have the fragility of the images that dilute in the
retina when the lids close as protection against
an abrupt excess of light. His figurations seem to
perpetuate the fleetingness of the exact instant when the forms
resist the dazzling saturation that has previously swallowed
its contexts, eliminating all volumetric perception, and any
possible difference in their universal, absolute essentiality.
Thus, although his frugal landscapes and seascapes, the
studies of objects of synthetic graphic signs, and the allegories
of animals with a certain will of a very personal “domestic”
bestiary all tend to the compositional minimalism and
symbolic condensation, they end by revealing an atypical
dimension of horror vacui. This dimension is articulated
from the omnipresent light, sole reality where any sketch is
scarcely fata morgana. Nothing lacks more emptiness than the
agglomerating light of everything that is possible.
Socorro therefore searches a light that contrasts itself.
Finally liberated from darkness as essential complementary
opposite, it reveals itself as univocal monad where all forms
converge and irradiate as plain temporary avatars that will
not take long to return to their matrix after an ephemeral,
illusorily independent tour. Because everything has always
dealt with the struggle between the void (resumed in darkness)
and the plenitude (identified with light). Total absence versus
omnipresence.
Socorro’s diluted forms dialogue with Suprematism, where
Malevich’s geometrical purities levitate autonomously in their

archetypical perfection as highest incarnations of the paradigm
systems of Modernity; while the work of the Cuban artist
finds its place in an undeniable postmodern perspective
with a melting of the great logic schemas that is stronger and
ineluctable than the thaw of the earthly poles. He proposes
each one of his paintings as a delicious contamination of all
the elements, conceived from total visual permeability that
turns them into legitimate results of the crisis of representation
assumed as normal in these days.
Thus, the endurable earnestness of the light, which could
be the reason for the deduction of impressionist principles in
Adrián’s paintings, leads his interpretation to a discourse on

the flagrant fragility and illusion of every representation, of
every cultural construction, always based on the synthesis
(ergo, reduction) from phenomenic to finite models in their
dialectic capacity, always condemned to an expiration date.
Every representation is therefore insufficient, and the
accumulation of meanings ends by breaking the exo-skeleton,
expressing its expansive nature, its unstoppable mutation.
Movement as sole constant. Thus, Socorro’s work can be
appreciated as a dynamic expressionist deconstruction of the
iconographies. Or as registers of the imago in full disintegration,
very much in accordance with the premises that can be handled
by a son (the artist) of the first Cuban generation that became
an orphan with the death of something so paradigmatically
modern as Utopia, and consequently adopted by the dystopian
Modernity.
From a discursive perspective, Socorro imagines ever more
sour allegories about the maddening condition of Cuban
insularity and the synonymy of the terms “sacrifice” and
“suicide”, “nation” and “yoke”, “patriotism” and “redundancy”
for the nationals in current times. Including the suicidal
wink at Warhol’s pop revolver in Isla, a profound psyco-social
dissection of the country.
While Pinocho miente porque puede (Pinnochio Lies Because
He Can) is an open reference to the pretension of absolute
power and totalitarian hegemony, Orador (Orator) borders the
limits of political humor, reducing this champion of frivolous
proselytism until making it disappear under the ever more
alienated and distant high-flown style of the discourse. The
six pieces that make up Mural are no less iconoclastic, with
other symbolic consecrations as concrete as the “attributes and
symbols of the fatherland” protected in their forced immovable
dimensions as disguised incarnations of idolatries.

n the foreword to her first book of essays, Susan Sontag
mentions the effect exerted on her by the feverish creative
explosion that shook the artistic and cultural scene of the
west during the decade of 1960. The overload of stimuli
and interesting options paradoxically became almost an
impediment for those who regarded the field of art not as a
plot but as a fast-growing root. Consequently, she decided to
assume the risk of simultaneously going in all directions after
realizing that eventually that was the road followed by several
of the artists that most interested and influenced her.
Half a century later and in a different context, the work
of José Capaz evidences a similar discursive will, based
on an omnivorous appetite for the contemporary visual
culture and the western artistic tradition. The artist makes
both universes coincide, opening a range of expressive
possibilities that enable him to dialogue with multiple social
and aesthetic issues. Thus, when his work brings together
the trace of a Rembrandt piece and an over-dimensioned
emoji in all its obscene superficiality, the question emerges
of how the interaction of new virtual media complicates the
reception of classic art, confronting at the same time the new
paradigms that rule the visual imagery of the present society.
The ultimate purpose is not to blur the borders between
low and high brow (which would only follow a decade-long
profusely treaded path), but rather investigate the way in which
the sensibility of the contemporary individual has changed
with the saturation of images and information to which he is
constantly exposed.

In this context where the reception of art is less and less
ruled by an aesthetic norm, José Capaz in his series Ictericia
(Jaundice) continues his search on the persistence of the “aura”
of classic works that is now part of the dynamics of rapid image
consumption that characterizes the present society. His main
purpose is to escape the abyss that exists between validating
through the form and the imperative of the concept. The
subversion of the classic reference masks an apology of the
great masters’ painting craft, ever more difficult to appreciate,
particularly if the reception takes place through the screen of
an electronic device.
The artist is capable of following several paths at the same
time, as the result of an extremely far-reaching creative ambition
concerning themes and style. His art maintains a coherence
that is only understood when realizing to what extent his work
is indebted with fragments and with representation models
that mix and superimpose around a repeated motif. Such is the
case of the pieces that make up the series Una pintura de género
(A Genre Painting) through which the creator avails himself
of the representation of tongues understood as concrete
variations of a symbol of multiple echoes and meanings. In
some cases the tongues invade the entire canvas; in others they
contribute to dramatize classic scenes such as seascapes, or
convulse reproductions of battles resulting from the imagery of
Romanticism. They always introduce a sort of estrangement,
and their presence, expressed in marked gestural strokes and
thick pasting, has been injected with a disturbing metonymic
value, as if its collateral meanings would suffice to describe the
archetypical human being.
The dialogue between José Capaz’s work and the western
art canon and its mutations slanting the visual culture of
contemporariness does not merely respond to the urge of
reformulating old questionings or solving current problems
related with the validation of art. Several of his most recent
pieces such as Paranoia or Pharmacy Blonde evidence a
marked expressionist character and a dark atmosphere loaded
with psychic impulses. Nevertheless, if we ask the artist he will
probably tell us that the impulse (in his case the term seems
more adequate than “inspiration”) to create them emerged
from sources as scarcely predictable as the observation of a
western or the contemplation of an 18th century portrait. The
filter of his subjectivity takes care of the rest, meaning almost
everything. This will to transform is not exactly the result of

what Harold Bloom called “anguish of the influences”
referring to writing, which is perfectly applicable to the artistic
context. If José Capaz, having succeeded in externalizing his
unconsciousness, were to meet his “symbolical Padre”, he
would not for one moment consider beheading him. He would
probably hold a cheerful conversation with him and hardly
allow him to speak, commenting on the many projects he has in
mind. Some he would even start during the conversation.

he landscape has quite a few cultivators within
the circuit of contemporary Cuban art. It has
been receiving even more acceptance among very
young artists who fully involve in experimentation.
However, some of these emerging artists still prefer figuration
or expressionism. In the painting Alejandro Jurado Morales
(Havana, 1986) the creative impulse is born from experience,
but transformed into spaces and music, which inevitably arrive
or depart. He has studied the legacy of lyric abstraction and
post-impressionism in the ways of solving the strokes. It is
there where he feels more at ease, amid the color spots and the
recognizable motifs deprived of realism, in the own freedom
and expansion that enlivens nature as a whole.
Hence the possibility of discovering the influence of
Riopelle or Hartung in the initial canvases, but that slowly
leads to Turner’s romanticism and Kiefer’s uniqueness. I guess
it is also a form of verifying the transformation in the image
of his work: from a more aggressive painting fond of dripping
and a high contrast palette to a quieter one with predominance
of natural motifs. In these paintings, the apparent opposition
of the color stains reveals the organic duality that extends from
the central zones, as well as the multiple stains that punctuate
the colored surfaces he boldly employs to dig into daily life,
history or the simple beauty of an ordinary day’s end.
Alejandro Jurado’ work focuses on the possibilities of
expression of the landscape to introduce planes of living
experience, employing flowers as main metaphor of his visual
discourse.

Everything comes together: physical time, the wishes left
behind throughout life and the national history experienced
by the body. Each painting becomes a reflexive fragment of an
expanded composition. That composition is the very existence
and its finiteness, expressed in each one of its aspects: the
private, the social and the political.
From the very beginning, in the most acid period, the
titles already had an important value. Later they became
more direct, and for that reason it was easier for the viewer
to discover the codes handled by the artist behind the
transparencies and dissimilar layers of color. Sometimes the
titles are given in Roman numbers because they start by being
studies, but the idea finds a good finishing, becomes more
corporal and transforms into an independent work. Perhaps
one of the places that most pieces has inspired him is the
Topes de Collantes landscape because of its incomparable and
unrepeatable vegetation, but in the paintings it remains an
enigma since there is no direct reference to it in any of them.
His present work precisely moves between the closed nature
and the flirting with the borders of figuration and abstraction.
He has learned each one of the legacies of abstractionists and
romantics, of foreigners and locals. A sort of charming rural
scene with all its colors and specificities enlivens this visual
essay, which is nothing but a testament in images of a vital
experience marked by the alleged innocence of bunches of
flowers faithful to their creator and to their time.

he crisis of representation in art (already noticeable
since the avant garde movements of last century)
is no longer a theme that disturbs or stimulates
the current symbolical production. For those of us
embedded in current art and its diverse facets, the traditional
seems to have succumbed in the face of the great wave of
cultural postmodernisms restricted to the ephemeral, the
perishable and the transitory existence of its concrete forms.
But even when “fine arts” lose space in the era of the media and
conceptual constructions, their presence is still an enriching
experience for art lovers.
Perhaps for that reason (and for the candid, unselfish
gesture in front of a sordid and extremist scenario) the works
of Eric Alfaro Gómez (Moscow, 1991) are so attractive. This
creator finds in the portrait the support to show himself as
a true expert of the academic trend, appropriating all the
elements leading to “good painting”. His art, still incipient, is
that of a philanthropist who searches into human sensibilities
and reveals through a realistic painting the tender gesture, the
grumbling glance, or the insinuated eroticism. His interest
in widening the craft and exalting the portrait as mixture of
technical and formal knowledge results in the combination of
novelty and tradition, recycling and authentic work.
In his series Flowers (2016) the flower is the distinctive
element in each one of his models, and at the same time a mere
pretext for the formal experimentation and aesthetic delight,
exerting unwonted imitation. A naïveté at times persists in
their faces, which is nothing but the means to reveal the secrets

in the image: the sexuality and sensuality hidden in their
candid poses.
On the other hand, in Needle (2017) he chooses to paint
feverish images in detriment of the precious line, aimed at the
nervous brush, dripping and strong pasting. Here the tattoos
on the skin of his figures become metonymy of distortion and
dislocation of a reality that appears as penetrating and incisive
as the very action of the needle on the muscular tissues.
But if up to the present Eric Alfaro shows firm steps in
his painting career, his poetic nature reaches perhaps higher
levels in his black and white drawings. It is in this field that
the artist finds himself and employs his drawing potentialities
in an extraordinary way when imitating real faces selected
from photographs and daily memories. His valuable technical
mastery and keen-sightedness to capture moving and
true gestures evidences a personal seal that, despite being
figurative, does not lack space and sense. On the contrary: the
representation is the result of a research prior to creation where
a good pulse, knowledge of human anatomy and boundless
imagination are outstandingly present.
Let us imagine that his standpoint is that of a chronicler of
genres that places his figures on the borders of tracing to make
them become characters with legitimate attitudes. That is why
we perceive in his women a hedonism achieved by the aesthetic
delight in their most sensual attributes (hair, lips, glance) and
at the same time we see the humanized painter in his studio.
Both paths will serve the artist to search between the formal
renewal of the portrait and the addition of attributes to
contribute to its full brilliance. Precisely in this coming and
going is where Eric Alfaro finds his best achievements.

he city of Bernardo Navarro Tomás (Havana, 1977)
stores the trace of a journey that multiplies between
memory and the present. It is a space generated from
obsessions and ruptures, the result of knowledge
and of the daily experience raised to the aesthetic meaning of
the representation. Born in the neighborhood of Vedado, in
the capital, his discourse has developed under the influence
of specific phenomena such as the Bauhaus aesthetics,
expressionism and readymade, all combined with the strong
influence of the Cuban environment, in which stand out
the transgressor and non-conformist spirit of the painting
generation of the 1980s and other artists of solid lineage like
Antonia Eiriz and Raúl Martínez.
A visible aggregate of political connotation of his transit
through pop art is revealed in the series Los nietos de Karl Marx
(Karl Marx’s Grandchildren) (2013); and El coco te comerá (The
Bogeyman Will Eat You) (2013); the latter is a totally satirical
image where “the big leader” is reproduced in front of his
own discourse. Next to that “great leader” he is a common
protagonist in many of the works from this period, almost
always coexisting with symbols that point at the culture and
way of life of his natural enemy: the Empire.
Having moved from Havana to Brooklyn (where he
currently resides) in 2004, he reconstructs and combines
details of the two most important urban presences that make
up his experience. We stand before a mind that changes but
preserves the pigments of a zone related with affection and
memories; an identity that integrates without traumas and

learns to enjoy the development with full freedom to hand us
the emotion of vertigo in the descent.
In the new habitat he experiences, unlimited, the
unwonted freedom of color and forms. This is transformed
into a sort of state of mind that penetrates him and provokes
in him the urge of finding the face of the imagined city. We
stand in front of the space comprised and interpreted through
layers and textures, on occasions intervened by elements such
as newspaper paper, where certain spelling elements attract
attention. These characteristics stand out in most of his recent
pieces, granting them a particular appearance, a kind of density

that incites to meditation leaving a clear, pleasurable feeling.
Navarro has achieved a balance (of which he profits
considerably) between the introduction of the concept and the
prevalence of the form as visual instinct (which he calls visual
textures); on occasions they suffice to ensure the legitimacy
of the piece and its impact on the viewer. Fragments of his
work comment the city through the dynamics of the citizens,
while others make use of the constructive structure. One of the
main characteristics of the work is the already mentioned color
frenzy, which serves to support a forceful subjectivism.

Several of these pieces stand out for their circular format.
A somewhat rustic, challenging geometry is discovered
particularly in some of them, eager to display its metaphorical
capacity from the infinite possibilities of combinations
enclosed among said forms, suggesting situations and conducts
referred to present tensions.
One of his current works is the series City Aura (2018),
where austerity (paper and crayons) and detachment are
present. In it he practices the strategy of calming the instincts
to obtain a lively harmony from his contributions, and where
colors transform themselves into sounds in unwonted form.
We are convoked to the melodious feast of the forms, to
the dismounting of the daily habitat of millions of people,
transformed into a joy that eventually resembles a plural chant
of birds.

he figurations in these canvases are closer to the
phantasmagoric than to a possibility of becoming
verses, as if they would convoke millenary exorcisms
or dark evocations. They are possessed by an
evocative silence, by an infinite collection of silences that, in
the words of Lezama Lima, is a blood throng, a compulsive
shock, a hermetic journey to an underworld overcrowded with
indecipherable transparencies.
Yuniel Delgado Castillo constructs a figuration with no
faces, a sort of inverse mannerism in a secularity nauseated by
affected strokes and HD. What disconcerts from his work is
the power of expression of his actors, who lack transcendence
and hyperbole. It is true that his work can lead us to a
comparative reflection on art; however, it is irrelevant to get
lost in assumptions or denials on the conformation of the
work. Truly important is the expressive force of the image, the
distinctive way in which the composition maintains a balance
in the silence; the way in which the stone face keeps to itself the
momentous configuration of the dream. Let us stop searching
for the analytical grounds of contemporary art and let us look
at the telluric force trapped in a stretcher.
As revival of a bullfight, reminiscence of an agonic
nightmare, these specters colonize in an expressive way, as if
Nemesis invoked in them a dark purpose that is setting a trap
in the hibernation denied in time or is signed by a misfortune
that is nothing but the argument of the solipsists. The morbid
nature of a figuration accompanied by a rhythm often
associated to the undulations of the excessive curves denotes an
expressionist reminiscence seldom present in Cuban painting.

As if racked with suffering, with an unpredictable agony,
the figuration of Yuniel Delgado Castillo exercises the writer’s
hand like few do today.
His strokes open a wound, tear the surface warmed up by
germination, bleed to achieve healing. Thick filigree creates a
voraciousness that opens a dark, secular abyss. Looking into
it, submerging, places us in an edgy and striking decline of
our condition to attend a foreseeable profoundness, distant
from the pampered mirror that gives back to us the image of
Narcissus. So deeply lost was I when one summer afternoon in
autumn disguise I visited his studio.
83

The atmosphere of his work transmits images more
associated to dreams than to the possibility created by a
fiction narrative. They are film cuts, specters, memories, or,
in the worst case, premonitions closer to Rasero’s sensibility
in Sueño de la razón (Dream of Reason). Everything is
vertiginous although we may have the sensation that the
rhythm sculpted in Tarkovsky’s times slows it down. Sparkles
that illuminate and blind. Disconnected parts that announce
an oracular axiom in their flight.
The force of this work lies in its shocking composition
and rhythm plagued with an intestinal movement that
evaporates any vestige of joy. His painting is an anthology
of sufferings and efforts. His expressive force cannot be
sufficiently condensed or compared in an analytical sentence.
Today more than ever, contemporary art necessarily goes
through a body of references that leads to the aesthetic
experience. Without it we would be like a cow in front of
an orchestra.
The work of Yuniel Delgado Castillo is also a search of
the human, of what we have been, what we have pretended
to be and what we have become. A sort of Cortázar’s bestiary,
only accessible from a fiction narrative. The piercings and
lack of chromatism in his painting are nothing but his
own lacerations, his anguish reflected on a canvas. A kind
of vademecum of prodigious audiences. Dante’s Inferno,
Lezama’s Paradiso. Two universes; a vitality infested by the
timid smile of sarcasm and expressed in the fragility of our
condition.
Vertigo is the most contemporary element in Cuban
painting; it is granting a certain universal theme to the
morphologic and conceptual research, as well as a new way
of constructing from the imagination. Perhaps this is a sign
of a definitive change toward a new sensibiliy in addition to a
new understanding and its necessary possibility of narration.
The work of Yuniel Delgado Castillo is impressive, not
only because it lacks arrogant and recurrent norms, but
because the sensibility generated by the memory places this
creator before a still unexplored will. To undo the agony
and restore the memory of unfinished and indecipherable
moments is undoubtedly a necessary archaeological exercise
for the entire Cuban culture.

In this way I expect that we may be able to definitely
overcome the still chasing hidden ghosts in order that,
deprived of remorse, we may produce an overwhelming
blow to enable them to reincarnate in a new, omnipresent
secularity with makeup of future.

suppose that when five years go by in any artistic career,
the foundations become stronger and the debts begin to
be settled. In Armando Recamán’s case, his eight-year
practice of abstraction already shows several achievements
where the creative impulse has finally found the true concerns
of its creator.
Although every creative process nourishes from information
and experiences born from one’s privacy, several markers may
be identified in Mandy’s work that make his work currently
tend more toward the spiritual and esoteric, the mysteries of
astral cards and no longer that much toward the city, as has
been the case with a large part of the local practitioners who
offer us the urban space or the colored island, or embrace
geometric abstraction.
His recent work has become more synthetic and contains a
significant number of his beliefs and experiences: his personal
and filial relations coexist with his pact with the moon in all its
cycles and with the constant contrast of the chiaroscuro, where
white appeals directly to the faith or to medicinal herbs to
clear the way and get rid of negative energies. Three different
experiences that he interrelates with total ease, knowledge that
coexists without conflicts and is harmoniously complemented
to create powerful pieces.
It is a relief to know that a personality and his work go
together in parity, that the calmness transmitted by the canvas
finds an echo in the songs broadcasted by Radio Encyclopedia,
that his faith is translated into strokes and signs, and elegantly
displayed through a mitigating palette.
Recamán has experience already in group and solo shows.

An early piece from 2012 had anticipated his contemporary
projection when distancing from his Tribute to Carlos Enríquez
(part of his series Fantasías, 2010) or from previous works that
granted space to the Orishas (as in Olorun), in order to jump
to abstraction that same year with his Tribute to Raúl Martínez.
The metaphor is his tool, the linguistic resource to transmit
his images. In two mixed technique series on cardboard from
2016 –Pacto con la luna and Encuentros– there is an emotional
quality in the colors, and the symbols appear in houses, moons,
the artist’s name and the Palo Monte religion. Circles likewise
coexist in them with superimposed areas, particularly in
Encuentros, turning the reception into a process that involves
the close examination of each one of his collages.
In Fluidos (2017) all the elements come together: the
vault of heaven and an internal rhythm created with lines that
pretend to represent body fluids. Hoy soñé contigo and Osafún
show more openly his influence from the landscape, partially
due to the color palette with a predominance of green shades;
eventually the reference to the four cardinal points and the
phenomenon of the countryside and the change become
evident. The use of greens, ochre and black is always tempered
by a promising white, a light for the new road, a candle of
spirituality.
When contemplating this leap in his work, one can assert
that there is no more ‘before’. The direct reference to the
pre-Hispanic and Yoruba deities has been transformed into a
bold reference based on signs and symbols: figuration yields
to abstraction. The mind has freed itself from the tributes to
focus on an intimate discourse. The city with its structures is
relegated to a second place to allow the recreation of a personal
understanding of the world and its elements to reign in each
piece. The artist and his universe inhabit each part of the
canvas in an infinite celebration of life that approaches him
to specific codes of the landscape, but without abandoning
the road marked by his earthly sign. Therefore, Mandy must
be taken into consideration when speaking of contemporary
Cuban abstraction. No room for doubts. Congratulations!

or some, the goddess Bia1 incarnates feminine
force and violence, and all they know about her is
her irascible and impetuous temper. For others,
Bia is considered a protective and proud deity who
defends her beliefs and feelings, going as far as to unleash an
indomitable force in order to attain her objective. She certainly
condenses two opposed poles with regard to personalities and
passions.
The Bia syndrome is currently observed in key points of
society, in the individuals, in their forms of thought, in the
unbreakable political and power structures, in the cultural
universe and in the development of the different communities.
The existence of a society resulting from globalization makes
the different nuances dilute in the face of the extreme actions
and ideas that mobilize the individual. Non-sense absolutisms
are accepted just as they are, regulated and established in such
a way that they become laws, authoritarian truths without
possibility of change.
Precisely the art circles are a rich and sensitive zone in
which the “Bia effect” develops. That appears in the works of
a self-taught Cuban artist with incredible vocation for art that
conscientiously explores in detail the still unsolved concerns
in his mind and presents them through the canvas, the
installation, and the legendary drawing technique.

1

Bia is the goddess of force and violence. Together with her brother Kratos, she is
characterized by her devotion to the duty of protecting Zeus entrusted to her. Her warlike
capacity is admirable; she is precise and the most deadly one during the battle. Although she is
best known as a goddess of strong personality, she has great fondness for her brothers Kratos,
Zelo and Niké, for whom she would not hesitate to use her fist in battle to prevent them from
the suffering caused by others. Her representative weapons are the double swords.

Frank Rodvent (Havana, 1982) is authentic in his work.
He investigates in detail the theme he wishes to present in his
pieces, finds peculiarities, creates connections and adds to his
search a dose of creativity and interesting debates. During his
search he also gathers a number of personal anecdotes and
family experiences that he carries with him. His method is
based on the concept of polarity, of dual perspectives. Bia is
thus physically and conceptually present in Frank Rodvent’s
art. The term ‘violence’ is presented by him from the dual
probability of its meaning, based on the context and personal
experience of each individual.
The artist handles the daily elements through established
philosophies, and does so from the subjectivity of different
points of view, all valid and possible. He uses the resource of
irony and a humorous tint in his works, each one of which

is liable to questionings. He makes opposed ideologies
coexist in his canvases and installations, icons of controversial
meanings, antagonistic themes of individual concern that
reach social macro levels. His production abounds in objects
and elements of the most dissimilar forms, functions and
degrees, among which are grenades, coins, shackles, boxing
knuckles, chains, letters and popular images: a whole symbolic
range whose greatest value is found in facing their opponent.
The pieces that make up his series Mask are based on the
discursive diatribe of the polyhedron: everything is variable,
everything is paradoxical... The meaning of this series goes
beyond the mere concept of the “mask” as barrier dividing
different states. It conveys the sense of splitting, of what we
know and of what we are forced to know. And splitting is
meant as tool to show other possible forms of apprehension of

the alleged beauty canons, or to find spicy themes such
as violence from other perhaps not traditional angles but
indeed existing and being practiced, through which to raise
awareness on complex topics whose implementation depends
of subjective appreciations more than of pre-established ones.
Frank Rodvent explores the paradoxes and attempts to
favor a possible marriage between opponents. In this regard,
his work gains a tint of risk and challenge at the same time.
Risk if he is capable of reinventing himself a polemic discourse
each time, proposing other clues for the exegesis of suggestive
meanings. Challenge in the sense of further awakening the
impetuous wild beast of goddess Bia, with the purpose of
always finding possible nuances in the opposed ends.

hen the artist’s mind is full of convulse
thoughts, his hand becomes a sort of personal
narrator. The creator has the tools to realize the
idea; he just needs to paint “a repressed shout”
in order to shine on the support.
The artists’ need to express their most intimate passions
has found an echo in humanist discourses. Cuban creators
are no exception in this regard, since that will of defense,
concern and criticism regarding the individual and way of life
in postmodern society has been reflected to a greater or lesser
extent in our context. The greatest achievement belongs to
the artists whose intelligence allows them to say the same but
differently.
When the most valuable aspect of creation is not what is
said but how it is represented, it becomes necessary to stop
before the work of Danco Robert Duportai (Havana, 1997), a
young man with the ability to charm with this creative capacity.
His works impact by the nature of his support: staples that
he covers with oil paint and joins to produce images of only
3-4 cm formed by pieces as of a puzzle, as scenes of fragile
memories.
His models are conceived from color spots, showing
particular interest for expressionist figuration. Each brush
stroke is autonomous when creating the forms of the
figures. His “minimalist” expressionism establishes a majestic
communication.
Creating in reduced spaces forces him to stop more in the
details; that is why he is able to effectively capture vibrations,
sensations and unsteadiness.

In pieces like 16 de marzo. 6:00 pm, Gottfried Helnwein’s
piece Stress and Munch’s famous and iconic shout seem to fuse
in a single painting. Although the three artists are distant in
context, they share the intention of presenting us with the
individual whose image projects the alteration of the spirit
and easy disorder of the senses. Once more we are faced with
a sharp, mute and desperate shout. Danco’s piece, in turn,
does not show the deformity that is present in Munch’s whole
conception of his painting. Nor is the exquisiteness in the details
to be perceived that stands out in the hyperrealism highlighted
by Gottfried, that master of the surprising recognition. His
expressionism is a more intimate, more tempered, but more
ailing one. It would seem as if the reasons that torment the
character are less abstract and deeper than those of the other
authors.
What marks the difference in Danco’s work is precisely
the staple as support, undoubtedly an innovative and daring
element, but not in the least a random one. He could paint on
canvas (which in fact he does); however, he has let himself be
carried away by his ingeniousness and succeeds in exploiting
the possibilities offered by this material. Challenging the
alleged scarce durability and complexity of painting on the
staple pieces, he pretends to show us a scene constructed from
a series of mini scenes, where the pieces could be assembled
and taken to pieces, then inverting their order to create a new
work.
The fragmentation of reality, in addition to granting new
meaning to the work, evo kes that sensation of vagueness and
fragility produced by the memory. This makes him not only
a postmodern creator but an artist who understands that the
value of art starts with the study to conceive the piece and is
completed with the public’s intervention.
Danco has that ability to combine form and content
effectively in a format of only a few centimeters. More
than a painter he is a minimalist creator and an expert in
communicating the physical condition of a repressed shout.

erhaps KHRONOS should be understood as the last
effect of the late postmodern saga in the symbolic
production emerging in Cuba. However, it has come
to be a new sign of that high post modernity in our
visual culture.
If we take into consideration our cultural reality up to the
early 1990s (a kind of hybrid between western aesthetics and
the unique proposal we recycled from the countries of Eastern
Europe) we will inevitably arrive at a question that poses a
great cultural paradox: What strange simulacrum was the one
we lived in when we emulated essentially the western forms
and cultural trends with a pragmatic knowledge of that reality,
designed and controlled by the market in all its aspects? And
from there, to other many questions: Can we talk of an evident
influence of the market and its formal codes on the Cuban art
that followed the above mentioned decade? Was (or is) there
in our context an artist influenced by the orthodoxy of pop
art, immerse in reverting the experience of the market and the
cultural industry until turning it into art? Can we talk already
in our space of a media conscience without innocence, capable
of molding attitudes, customs, styles/simulations of life, among
other social performances? Is there any possibility in Cuba for
an art of media essence when we are still a disconnected country,
with a seven-channel television system where advertising is an
anachronism in midst of the propaganda feud?
KHRONOS seems to pose all these questions (though not
explicitly) in the chronology of its creations, particularly in those
works that analyze the fortune achieved in our context under
so many irregular conditions by media art, the technocracy
and that already classic form perpetuated in its iconicity that
elaborates the hard core of pop art. The aesthetic attitude of
this creative duet, the way in which they appropriate U.S. pop

as if it were not a foreign tradition inadaptable to our cultural
imagery might even seem strained;. But that appreciation would
be nothing but a provincial reflex, ignorant of the new flirting
insinuated in our environment, if we start the dialogue without
being prejudiced by the market codes.
That prefabricated, Suprematist island, victim of the
magazine Sputnik during childhood, marked in its youth by the
intermittence of legendary video films of Michael Jackson and
Madonna, the sporadic presence of Nintendo in some homes and
the velvety image of the Backstreet Boys; profaned in adulthood
by the porno violence of Bruce Lee, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude
Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris no
longer exists; it has become an unrepeatable myth worthy of
taking shape in a museum. Today, instead, we awaken to an
unsuspectedly technocratic reality represented by icons, images,
sounds, virtual spaces... And it is in that change to virtual, in
that double (socialist-capitalist; third world-consumer) identity
that codes us, in the mythomania and media stress, where the
(artistic?) production of KHRONOS makes sense.
While the rhetoric of this duet is framed within the serial
nature and saturation of the same icon following the form of
operation of the market, their creation moves and varies from
one support to the other. In this way we face a production with
no aesthetic hierarchies, since a process is created that includes
painting, sculpture, video art, photography, and advertising,
among other practices embodying the contemporary spirit.
The creative saga of KHRONOS started with a few
paintings inscribed within the pop aesthetic and embellished
by an ironic tone in simple phrases of extreme vanity. Then
came the overexposure, the construction of the own, fictitious,
eccentric and hallucinated, substantially trendy image. Because
KHRONOS undoubtedly has its start in the attitude we show, in
the cynical condition of posing all the time, imagining ourselves
under the eternal lamp of an HD or 4K camera. KHRONOS
definitively recalls the U.S. film of cult The Truman Show (Peter
Weir, 1998) where life is suggested to us as an eternal reality.
After all, where does fiction begin and where does it end?
momento, imaginándonos bajo el foco sempiterno de una
cámara HD o 4K. KHRONOS definitivamente recuerda esa
película de culto americana, The Truman Show (Peter Weir,
1998), donde se nos sugiere la vida como un eterno reality.
Después de todo: ¿Dónde comienza y acaba la ficción?

he Sergio of Memorias del Desarrollo, like the Sergio
in Alea’s film, wanders as an autistic in the city. He
watches, touches and analyzes everything; however,
beyond himself everything appears as an island and
all bridges have been broken. Garcet is a castaway in the center
of New York, an immigrant whose immediate relation with
“reality” is intervened by the distancing, the negation and
apathy. His present is based on memories recreated from the
juxtaposition of squizoid images from photographic archives,
press releases or letters, recordings or music themes that create
a sort of psychic palimpsest.
The trace of a fragmented memory is also registered in
the work of the young Cuban artist Reynier Llanes (Pinar del
Río, 1985) established in the United States. Imaginary scenes
and passages from two different geographies mix randomly
in it. His characters are the prototypes: mercenaries, dandies,
gangsters or golf players. He retakes some guess work on
popular religiosity, eroticism and the temperature of a dreamt
island or industrialization and consumption. In his work the
playful element challenges the spectacular side of daily life, the
loneliness, the hyper-rationalization and vice versa. Pieces such
as Where did you grow up? (2017) or Chant in Midnight Hill
(2017) give testimony of it.
Llanes has a precise technical mastery of the painting
resources, an exquisite ability to manipulate color, bring out
lights and mold figures by slightly blurring their outlines. His
work at some point most surely appeals to masters of North
American realistic painting. Many of his pieces are delectable

to the eye; such is the case of Enigma (2017). However, in my
opinion, the most daring are the ones in which the technical
craftsmanship mixes with the symbolic invention, when he
distances himself from the typical character and the customs
realism that tends to represent characters, objects and nature
in general with conventional details and the meaning is
created by appealing to the expressive possibilities of rhetoric
and painting resources in general. It is then that the metaphor
becomes more enigmatic and the reception turns ambiguous,

unleashing multiple reading possibilities. Such is the case of
Resurrection (2017) and Mapping Destination (2016).
In the first of these works a scene is presented where three
figures dialog about nuclear weapons. In cinematographic style
he builds a setting as if seen from a lower level. The masculine
bodies are fragmented in ellipsis, the missile is hyperbolized.
When we stand in front of Resurrection the frame from below
puts us stealthily inside a box, a tunnel or a hiding place. The
slightest movement may betray us as intruders. In any case,
none of us are invited to this meeting. Reynier reminds us that
the decisions on the fate of the world are ultimately taken by a
few that exert power. We must remain on the sly. Using a trap
of perception, this piece becomes one of his most challenging
compositions.
In Mapping Destination, a man wearing a suit is inside a
car in movement. More than human, he resembles a cyborg.
His hard features, cold color and distinctive red flash in his
glance betray him. The skin and clothes must cover the iron
structures. The organic nature mixes with the technological
devices. A prodigy of cybernetics. His name is probably T-800
or RR-37. Although not explicitly shown in the work, we can
guess each of the attributes that make up our image of the
mutant by some minimal signs of meaning left by the artist on
the canvas. With this piece we dare to penetrate symbolically
the hiding places of post-human identity, a theme that appears
repeatedly in the philosophical debate of the 21st century.
I could speculate that the artist is interested in
several themes derived from his experiences in the island:
conversations, headlines, aesthetic and ideological theses of
films and TV series, forms of life in general... He chooses
from the memory and recombines in visual images. The theme
of memory in his work also becomes a squizoid or alienated
experience, but unlike Sergio Garcet, in Llanes’s work we
witness the self-acceptance of a multiple, fragmented and
multicultural ego. The traces of his journey and eventually of
exile create an identity in his works that is mostly imagined.
Reynier builds bridges; he does not destroy them...

olor stains. Textures. Pasting. Art books on the table
of his studio share space with his pieces and work
materials. Several blank canvases wait for the artist
to approach and start his experimentations and the
new researches he is carrying out on contemporary painting.
Pedro Valerino (Manzanillo, 1981) is transforming the most
traditional of art forms with his work and at the same time
granting new values to painting with a more contemporary
glance.
His work, I would say, is part of the abstract expressionistic
trend that emerged in the late 1940s, including certain
influences of Motherwell’s strokes, Rothko’s contemplative
line and Ad Reinhardt’s painting minimalism. Starting from
these somewhat historical determinations Valerino has taken
advantage of each lesson, each reading, and each museum visit
to elaborate his own visual codes.
Despite the arbitrary or subjective distribution of color in
his works, we appreciate a precise handling of his brush and
spatula. Each canvas is a visual object that induces to touch
and feel each one of his strokes. He knows how to play with
the viewers’ senses.
His creative process has evolved from the horror vacui in
his series A Word, Love, Pages to a more experimental painting
where he explores with new supports and materials.

Pedro Valerino has consequently followed a path that
seeks a unique aesthetic and formal line. A blank canvas is the
means to make traces in different shades, as if his practice were
based on Philip Ball’s text The Invention of Color. Our glances
stop to contemplate each detail, because the artist strives to
create a mental condition in the viewer using concepts such
as space and their painting solution. His works produce both
pleasure and concern, isolating us completely from our daily
environment and leading us to other universes, succeeding in
focusing our attention exclusively on what we are observing.
Our artist’s creation presents us with a new language that,
while connected to international art, preserves the own roots.
He profits from his traditions, makes reference to Pedro de
Oraá, Martínez Pedro, and Loló Soldevilla to achieve a new
language in abstract art, a new vocabulary made in Pedro.
Valerino’s works remind me of a phrase of art critic Marta
Traba, who states that abstraction “is born from the wish to freely
express emotions and sensations, thus justifying the stain or loose
stroke with the spiritual force of the empty space. That is why a
poetic shade repeatedly appears in groups or individual artists.”
Abstract art, since its start, has never denied or opposed reality;
on the contrary, it inserts itself in it and is regarded as a sharp
and extensive answer of its multiple and changing state in time
and space.
From now on I will closely follow the work of this artist.
Why hadn’t I heard from him? Anyway, with this text he
is already part of my knowledge of contemporary Cuban
painting. Keep going ahead, Pedro, with your reflexive,
empathic and ludic work.

t was when I recalled Julio Cortázar’s De cronopios y famas
that I was able to compare the atmosphere in which the
works of Lisyanet Rodríguez and Maikel Domínguez
create what I have called subtle fulgurations. With
caution and cynicism transmuted into innocence, these two
creators invade the Miami art spaces to clear the jungle where
the political fanfare usually reigns, disguised as literary or
aesthetic exercise. It is difficult to clear the way under such
circumstances when make-up and performance predominate.
As in all (or almost all) things, something that I wouldn’t know
how to define (because it wouldn’t be the truth or the right
thing) asserts itself.
Two creators, two morphologies, two confluent
visions, two gravitating ontologies establish a dialogue with
contemporariness by restructuring classic canons.
Painting as genre, and particularly Cuban painting,
has reappeared in an unusual way in the last ten years. The
painting trend centered around a certain vision has “displaced”
a production based on the new media that had set itself up as
guarantee of contemporariness.
Lisyanet Rodríguez and Maikel Domínguez are indeed
visually opposed; however, what makes them coincide is a
critical standpoint regarding one of the canonic forms of
western painting, evidencing the infinite capacities of a medium
that refuses to be limited to a specific form. With a rather
unusual mastery of drawing and painting, these two creators
establish an image that is not always restricted to what has
been known as abstraction, portrait, hyperrealism or pop-art.

Availing themselves of the techniques inherent to these secular
forms, they rather produce an image that is closer to what
Cortázar called “cronopio”, a sort of dissipative or root-like
structure, unattainable, indefinable in its full extension and
magnitude. Not only do the outlines reflect this escape; the
very evanescence in their composition, characters and drama
create a dynamics where the theatricality overflows and
devours the entire canvas surface. The very fleetingness of their
characters creates an absent structure that does not require
being “represented”, because in their very phantasmagoric
nature they destroy the Aristotelian causality merging with the
unconditional, a foundational principle of what José Lezama
Lima called “imaginary eras”, a sort of extended historicity
that refuses to be linear and teleological. That is why the
figures-characters-compositions of these two creators lack
a form in their canonic sense, are substance-ousias, Aristotle
would say.
While Maikel, in his general chromatic overflow, creates
a planimetry, a sort of grid of the experience where he fits
figures that refuse to be planimetric, Lisyanet reduces her
chromatic universe to explore a physiognomy in which its
mutations abandon the body to merge in a sort of Vishnu,
tutelary goddess. In any one of the cases, the bodies lack
memory, lack psyche (a psyche without a body, as called by
Macedonio Fernández), a sort of anxiety to submerge into
and emerge from the void. Hence the estrangement produced
by the figurations of these two images, a kind of extremely
lacerating ontological suspension compared in its sparkling
conciseness.
Lisyanet and Maikel live in a bunker where art is the
shield against the demons crowding pedestals and cornices.
Lisyanet and Maikel live without windows, and a pigmented
concrete wall of sarcastic and sublime appearance makes us
bend our weak skeleton to penetrate a space inhabited by
many although we may have the illusory sensation that we
are alone. Their secular morphologies, their high contrasts
in contrasting figures, their illusory inventions, their counter
meanings, their peaceful winks and tenderness hide a sinister
sensation. The human being is alone in the world, he only
has himself and his creative ability; that is what makes up his
existence. And this is precisely what is searched by these two
creators. The androgynous in Lisyanet, the search of the other,
the return to the origins from which the divisions of ideas and

language one day started out, the search of an identity that
merges with the other that is already oneself without being it.
Hence their figures, as if wanting to penetrate each other in a
heartbreaking and mutually fruitful act.
At the other end is Maikel, who recreates the grid from
the experience of ruling in squares. Though ennobled with
pale shades, the canvas grid reduces everything to a secular and
obituary order. Only the sudden figurations that occasionally
turn the fright into a super nature save us from being devoured
by a nominal linearity. And it is because Maikel compels to a
not always desired, but required dialogue between order and
chaos, between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The truth is that his
painting creates a seminal estrangement where at intervals one
feels that something does not fit.
With prodigious hands, these two artists give solid
steps to create an image that is scarcely Cuban and largely
universal. This may be an element to be considered in the
most contemporary Cuban painting production. Many
artists of this generation have assimilated an understanding
of the history of Cuban art with the sole purpose of putting it
aside and keep going ahead. The festive trend offered by this
freedom can only produce works (from a critical knowledge)
where the density eliminates any decorative attempt or sign
of it.
The spaces of expression in which Lisyanet Rodríguez and
Maikel Domínguez have created an image are only successive
approaches, tensions produced by the creative process, as one
whose language is insufficient to convey everything he says.
For that reason L. Wittgenstein at times chose to remain
silent. The convincing image, the laborious, paradoxical and
exuberant narrative associated to these symbolical structures
break that primary impulse linked to the ephemeral, to
penetrate deep into its “best definition”. That is why their
human traces gain life; they are not just strokes on a chromatic
canvas.
Lisyanet Rodríguez and Maikel Domínguez do not lower
themselves to simplicity; for them, as for José Lezama Lima,
only what is difficult is stimulating. Deprived of simulation
and of the sarcastic wish to resemble, these two creators do
what they best know how to do, with meticulous devotion.
Their works are a challenge to indecency and symbolical
indigence; they are frantic stop motion, the fluttering of a
white dove that announces the unexpectedly unimaginable.

ar has not ceased during two millenniums.
Apollo has riddled Dionysius all this time. The
battle field is where each man is. Socrates is to
blame for war; Plato is the accomplice. The
motif is always power. The Apollonians consider themselves
bulwarks of alleged Morals, Truth, and Beauty; the Dionysians
are bulwarks of Ecstasy, Licentiousness, and Passions. War
will continue as long as there is no dialogue between the two
armies. The work of artist Miriannys Montes de Oca provides
a large repertory of images of the present state of this war. It is
a conflict that today develops along more subtle paths than the
crusader’s bloody sword or the inquisitor’s stake. Apollonians
and Dionysians have adopted more sophisticated methods.
Their ever more effective messages spread an alienating
avalanche upon mankind, which only succeeds in experiencing
its consequences as sustained anguish. Today, a silent war is
taking place.
Miriannys’ eyes are fixed upon humans. She is motivated,
not by the great chronicles of heroes, but by the intimate
histories. Each one of her pieces is part of a large narrative
where she reinterprets in art the permanent dilemma of each
individual: the fracture between the social being and the
expectations of the Ego. The story that moved her to create the
series Los soportables pesos del ser (The Bearable Burden Of The
Being) (her graduation thesis at the University of the Arts), was
her father’s, typical dreamer that constantly is descended of
the clouds. Childhood, youth and adulthood are included by
Miriannys in metaphorical form in a kind of cinematographic

painting that ends in a symbolical suicide representing the
death of utopia. Next to the father as central iconic element,
other characters represent the persons who accompany him in
life, who symbolize the social network.
The visualization of the others in the series Escenas based
on the artist’s photographs of theatrical and contemporary
dance presentations was essentially phantasmagorical. Their
ghastly bodies reeked of death, bile and ruin. Others leaped
on the subject like a devouring and frightening machine, and
were visually connected with the codes of German expressionist
films. This may be explained if we trace contact lines between
Miriannys’ aesthetic thesis and those of the German movement.

The expressionist movies, just like the work of this artist,
denounced out loud the consequences of a “perverse
modernity”, whose consequences are a deep existential
anguish, the restrained hegemonic exercise of Reason and the
individual’s automation in hysterical race to transcend.
The others in Los soportables pesos del ser also have an
expressionist dimension, but not a negative one, as consequence
of the very process of creation. Miriannys summons to a theater
to a group of “actors”, who are not more than her relatives and
friends. She dressed them, makes up and directs. She creates
the prop and works the lights. She becomes scriptwriter, make
up person, scenographer, technician of lights and director at

the same time. The “actors” are photographed and used as
motif to construct the paintings. The others, the ghastly and
inquisitive mass presented in other series has more naturalist
and friendly tints here. She knows that, like her father, they
are victims of an Apollonian state of affairs, which explains
why these pieces are less ghastly than the others. Like the ones
that appear in La marcha de las antorchas and Amanda, la
niña vecina del frente, they have ceased to be that threatening
avalanche on the subject and have also become wounded.
The theatrical nature itself operates on a metaphorical key
to allude to a life, the western one, which historically develops
as a great staging. The Apollonian dimension intrinsic to
147

western metaphysics has condemned those subjects to life
imprisonment in themselves because the human being must
constantly play a role, simulate ideologies and feelings in order
to fit into the requirements demanded by the social network.
This, on one side, produces frustration, a fracture between the
Apollonian/Dionysian impulses, and on the other side is an
instinct of survival. The image of her entire work is marked
by a dual condition: on one side, the gloomy, dramatic and
theatrical nature of profoundly disturbing and enigmatic
characters; on the other side, “beauty”, the arabesque, flowers
and the tender detail. But beware: what might seem beautiful
in her work is just a simulacrum that alludes to all the artifices
that humans avail themselves of to disguise their scars, their
poverty and the frustration of being riddled over and over
again by Apollo. Dionysius loses again. Socrates is always to
blame. The human being has to endure his condition.

here is a sort of immanent vertigo in the fact of
understanding history as part of successive cycles in
which the circumstance or specific fact are no longer
important but become mere threads of a larger tissue.
It is a vision that, depending on the opinion or world view
of each individual may be tranquilizing or, on the contrary,
terrible, as normally happens with the attempts to establish
a mental map of the infinite assumed as physical, historical
and ideal space, all at the same time. When a creative attitude
connected to such premises is proposed from art, a number
of risks and possibilities also arise. How can the discourse be
deprived of all superfluous solemnity? How are the poetic
content and the metaphysical projection to be assumed with
honesty, but without failing to pay attention to the rhetorical
pomposity that derives from their excess? How, as a last resort,
can the references to a specific context become metaphors
liable to be registered –and read– within a wider environment?
The above questions present some of the specific problems
handled conceptually by Aryam Rodríguez Cabrera in his
artistic work. In it one observes a number of influences that
go from the Oriental systems of ideas –mainly Buddhism–
to certain symbolic elements associated to the Afro-Cuban
religious practices, to mention two examples.
The artist finds support in different methodologies and
iconographic resources, always maintaining the nature of the
original reference but reformulating or widening the potential
of its meaning.

In the confluence of symbols and metaphors in the works
it becomes evident that, whether it is religion, history or the
existential problems of the contemporary individual that are
being handled, they seek to communicate a message both
local and universal, personal and collective. An example of
it is his series Evangelios de nada (Gospels of Nothing) where
–more than questioning or exposing the limitations of every
social or conceptual system based on immutable values or
fixed precepts– the viewer is invited to transcend the act of
categorization; more than acceptance or rejection, the purpose
is to eliminate any type of normative discourse.
It is necessary to point out the spiritual element associated
to the works. Their link to certain philosophical and religious

precepts is not restricted to the references, but extends to the
own methodology of creation and exhibition of the pieces, and
to their relation with the viewer in the exhibition spaces. Even
though the act of experiencing, assuming or dialoging with the
spiritual content of the works may depend on the willingness
and sensibility of the receiver, who may or may not identify
himself with said elements, the cognitive value of the pieces is
evident. No Martí and No ceiba, among other pieces, express
simply and delicately ideas and concepts that in the end are
much more complex that what they seem to be from a first
reading. The adverb “no”, instead of denying, is used here to
subvert the binary understanding be it of the symbol or of the
object, inviting to assume it in its full complexity.

This, in a certain way, points to a permanent and personal
search of the meaning, constantly reformulating it without
tying it to any type of pre-established convention.
The same thing happens with the tankas or prayer banners
that bear remarkable structural and functional resemblance
to the Oriental reference, and whose thematic orientation is
nevertheless usually connected in depth to the Cuban context,
without restricting itself exclusively to it (Poder sobre poder, No
desesperes pradera todo caballo es efímero, Y en el silencio…). In
turn, works like El peso de la explotación and No luna show
an interest in exploring the quality of the material as receiver
of memory and identity. In the former, a piece of wood was
used that belonged to the legendary railroad between Havana
and Güines, pervaded with the sweat and blood of hundreds
of slaves and paid workers with practically the same living
conditions. Several thousand one peso coins pile up on top of
the piece, the same ones that today circulate in our country.
The connotations derived from the objects that form the piece
and their capacity to link specific future aspects of our social
and economic processes give rise to a powerful critical discourse
and echo a call to remember –and not to repeat– the history
of pain and suffering that accompanies the construction and
development of every nation.
Aryam’s poetic discourse is still developing, but the artist
has already clearly evidenced that he does not intend to reach
a specific, preconceived place. Therefore, let us hope that his
search will continue to produce works that invite to perceive,
carefully observe, and finally, question.

he mystery of vigor surrounds us, although normally
we are not aware of its presence. Once discovered and
beating in front of us, it becomes a catalyst of this
existence that tends to get stuck in the repetitive and
monotonous. For an artist, to discover or simply to sense this
phenomenon represents finding the energy that ensures the
credibility of his work for the viewer. The photographs of Osiris
Cisneros (Havana, 1985) are faithful to that vigor that enables
him to transcend to the events.
Cisneros’s nudes do not pretend to be based only on the
attributes and parameters frequently assumed by this type of
photography. In him there is a sort of network or web capable of
holding chronicles to introduce us to problems he assumes from
a very renewed perspective and full of polemic content. These
visual stories sometimes adopt a mysterious tone that almost
insinuates a police investigation; other times, pure cynicism is
reflected in the ability to resist the undeniable cruelty of our
times. In them, the feminine body plays the leading role and is
willing to detach itself from the classic restrictions imposed by
social practices and their memory.
That body has to endure too many tensions, and this
generates a process containing the practically infinite wealth of
individuality. Osiris nourishes from that reality; said universe
that is sometimes expanding, others contracting, enables him to
appropriate all kinds of textures and turn them into places where
it is possible to recreate and gain access to ideas and concepts
only born from such provocations. The objects and scenarios
he opposes to that source of intensity usually represented by
the beauty of his models have been very well chosen to create
the dialogues eventually shared by the consumers with great
complicity.

Many of these photos are made on austere settings, rustic
locations, city corners in which sensuality inserts itself with a
more brutal and suggestive tone. The view against the light,
the shadow, and the absence of color are distinctive features of
his work. With them he creates the adequate environments to
stimulate the content he deposits in them and which will be
interpreted as source of issues that may become very earnest.
His manipulation of the light deserves to be highlighted
because we know its magic touch can appear in a poem, a
sonata, a film, or, as in this case, in a photograph.
Each snapshot gives a non-hegemonic vision. When
frequently referring to that labyrinth called sexuality, he ranks
both genders equally, producing a sensation of neutrality. An
androgynous tone emerges from them, a surface deprived of
power codes that allows a pleasurable enjoyment and a wide,
though underground conspiracy.
The main figures are endowed with a moving visual quality
that enables them to contaminate one another. Lips, nipples,
muscles, buttocks; the sexual organ tentatively detonating
from the darkness. They are sensible points or flight lines of a
mixture that, when becoming consecutive begins to generate
a creative face. His is a very distinctive way of establishing
connections that are commonly frustrated by old pre-concepts
or by the already known archetypical postures blocking the
total freedom these instincts are bound to enjoy.
Osiris transforms objects of daily use such as the washing
machine and the refrigerator (both very much connected to the
history of women in the domestic environment) to convoke
to sequences saturated with pleasure. These objects lose their
stability when they become part of a dangerous dynamics; they
are kidnapped by the constant transgression, and facing them
the body continues to be a sort of chosen beast.
His work along this line started early in this decade in
Havana and seems to have had a coherent continuation after
settling in south Florida. The metaphorical element remains
intact in his work and is rather increasing; this is largely due
to his models and their inborn ability to understand through
their bodies the ambitions of the artist.